Why can't I find the features I need in a single solution? I have a virtualization host I use at home. I have a number of deveopment tools that still require Windows (AVR Studio, IAR MSP430 Compiler, etc). I use a Windows XP VM for each of these tools. For a long time I was hosting these VMs on my workstation. This worked well except that I could really only run one or two at any give time. Hence the move to the VM host. It's an 8 core system with 48GB of memory and handles the job well.

Now for my rant... USB... specifically remote USB sharing. VirtualBox has an RDP client that support USB redirection that works... sometimes. It recognizes my MSP430 programmers about half the time. I haven't gotten it to work with any iPod yet. The USB mass storage device for the iPod doesn't seem to work for some reason.

Enter VMWare. It's the alternative and using the VMWare remote console works great. USB devices work and everything is good -- except the VMWare remote console doesn't support sound on the remote system. For that, you have to use RDP and are back to the USB issue.

I'm digging in the the USB issues with the VirtualBox rdp client and hoping I can solve it. Still, why is it that everything has to be missing one important feature? Bleh.

Something that might be worth a look: Enable hardware I/O virtualization and pass a USB controller into the VM natively. I have not tried this personally, but it should be possible provided you have a motherboard and CPU that support VT-d/IOMMU.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

just brew it! wrote:Something that might be worth a look: Enable hardware I/O virtualization and pass a USB controller into the VM natively. I have not tried this personally, but it should be possible provided you have a motherboard and CPU that support VT-d/IOMMU.

Things work fine if the VM is on the same system that the USB device is plugged into. It's only when I'm trying to do remote USB that things are flakey.

Well, I did figure out what was causing the problem with the VirtualBox remote client last night. Apparently there is a collision between the remote client trying to access the mass storage part of the iPod and the host OS identifying it as a storage device and trying to read it. Now I just have to figure out how to prevent that collision.

just brew it! wrote:Is it a problem with the auto-mount behavior of the host OS? If so, that should be relatively easy to disable.

Perhaps. This would be a Kubuntu 12.04 system. It doesn't fully mount USB mass storage at insertion, but it does query it to present it as available for mounting. This is what shows up in the kernel logs.

just brew it! wrote:You may need to comment out a udev rule to disable the behavior.

Is KDE running on the host? If so, removing the user that runs KDE from the plugdev group is also worth a try.

Other than that killing functionality for normal USB storage...

*bleh* This shouldn't be that hard. This is the kind of thing that annoyed me about Windows and in this case, I think windows may actually do a better job as I can simply instruct it to not load a driver of a device and leave it that way.

I did get closer last night. Using a normal USB flash drive I could get the same behavior and I was able to get it to work by blacklisting the usb-storage module for that device. The iPod behaved a bit different but still didn't work though I'm not sure it wasn't a driver issue on the VM OS side.

SecretSquirrel wrote:Other than that killing functionality for normal USB storage...

Well, you did indicate that you are using a separate VM host. I assumed (incorrectly, I guess) that your other USB usage would be on the client side.

Maybe it's time to beef up the workstation so that it can run the VMs directly?

Ah, there is some confusion here. Yes, I am using a VM host, however the USB access is local to my workstation and is being redirected to the VM over RDP. I plug in my AVR Dragon, for example, and through the magic of USB redirection, it shows up on the WinXP VM that I am running AVRStudio on. In my case, the VM host is just upstairs in a rack, but in theory, it could be an Amazon EC2 instance for example.

It works well enough, except for mass storage devices. My workstation tries to do something with them that interferes with the VirtualBox RDP client's ability to access them for redirection. The fact that I want to be able to plug in USB mass storage devices on my workstation and actually use them on my workstation is what precludes me from just stripping out all the normal functionality. Since I have NFS mounted directories and an Samba server, I could get away with out making this work and just use network shares excpet for another problem where this provides a good solution.

I recently bought my daughter a new laptop. Unfortunately, it comes with Windows 8. It will be one of only two physical Windows systems in the house, the other being my 10 year old Thinkpad. I have no desire to muck around with Win 8 and nothing she does is tied to Windows, except for iTunes. I figured that I could spin up a Windows VM to host iTunes and she could connect in seamless mode, unfortunately the iPod shows up as a mass storage device and we are back to something that should "just work" being a royal PIA.